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There are so many MVNOs that will activate old cell phones for very little money, it is probably useful to keep them as spares. A car is a good place for a backup.
Also trips are a good place to bury a spare phone in the bottom of your luggage. You are likely to forget a phone in a hotel room, and you have a spare to call the hotel and your old phone to see if someone has taken it.
For an old Sprint phone, Ring Plus will give you up to 250 minutes and 500 texts for a $5 balance (overage minutes or texts are drawn against the $5 at 2 cents apiece). For a Verizon phone, Selectel Wireless will activate it for $75 and give you 2000 minutes and 2000 texts. Sometimes if it is not active it works for 911 and you can activate it with American Roaming Network (ARN) for $15 for 120 minutes of OUTGOING minutes only. ARN service works from most unregistered CDMA, TDMA mobile phones.
My cousin punishes his daughter for losing her iPhones (something she has done twice). She has to wait until his company updates his phone so he can give her his old iPhone as a hand me down. While there is nothing wrong with not replacing everything your kids lose, you still want to give her an old phone for emergencies. Most kids would find having to carry around a clam shell phone punishment enough.
If a person decides to destroy their phone and put it in the garbage, please think of the environment so take the battery to Homedepot, or another battery disposal place, to put in the bin there instead of tossing it in the garbage.
Let's be real. That is a complete waste of time and effort.
The device is likely to wind up in some impoverished hellhole where children will smash it up and melt it down to sell the raw materials. None of this will be done safely. The people doing the work will wind up inhaling, ingesting, and touching a bunch of lead, cadmium, and other nasty materials. It'll wind up in the air, the soil, and the water.
Better to just stick it in one of our modern landfills where it won't wind up poisoning people and polluting the water supply.
I still have the Motorola Tundra (no, the phone is not named after a truck) that probably needs a new SIM card. I stopped using this phone when I switched to a iPhone.
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